Qualitative neuropsychological measures: normative data on executive functioning tests from the Framingham offspring...

Area of Science:

• Neuropsychology
• Cognitive Aging

Background:

• Executive functioning is impaired early in Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia.
• Cognitive performance on executive tasks varies across normal aging.
• Clinical evaluation often uses qualitative data for subtle cognitive changes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if qualitative error responses in executive functioning tests are normative in healthy aging.
• To establish a baseline profile of errors in executive function tests across different age and education levels.

Main Methods:

• Administered executive functioning tests (Trail Making Test Part B, Similarities, Verbal Fluency) to 1907 cognitively normal individuals.
• Used regression analyses to associate vascular aging indices with qualitative performance.
• Included descriptive statistics for the sample.

Main Results:

• Qualitative errors on executive functioning tests were infrequent in the cognitively normal sample.
• Error commission rates were significantly associated with increasing age and education levels.

Conclusions:

• Provides normative data for errors on executive function tests, stratified by age and education.
• Enables comparison of qualitative test performance between clinical/research populations and normative data.